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Thursday, September 07, 2006

got some updating to do - CB therapy Vol II and III

I've got the Reader's Digest version of the final two days of last weekend's CB escapades finally. When last we left it, Friday's ride was short but top notch. Smiles all the way around, followed by the creation of much recycling as we relived the days events and discussed the riding yet to come. Well, here's what came:Foggy skies and intermittent rain. Still, we remained upbeat. Since we were at altitude amongst numerous big ass mountains, we realized that different valleys could hold different weather patterns. With that in mind, we loaded up the land yacht and sailed off to our destination. You guessed it - we arrived at the start of our planned ride only to find the weather so dispicably wet that we turned around and headed back to camp. We unloaded the bikes and the skies cleared up. Greg smiles as he drinks his coffee, despite knowing that we were about to fall prey to a suckerhole.That's right, a suckerhole. No definition needed. We rode up the dirt road under sunny skies, only to have that hole close back up. At the 30 minute mark, it was dumping enough rain that a few of our party turned back. Back to camp and then to the bar. Greg and I kept going. Up, up, up we climbed to stay warm. Temps were into the 50s and the rain continued to dump. We decided that our drivetrains weren't quite trashed enough, so we continued on up some boggy singletrack in the headwaters of Cement Creek. There was snow up in them thar hills, too. With that, we knew we had been bested so we turned around. The 20 minute road downhill wasn't exactly inspiring. Or warm. We cleaned up and headed off to meet up with our comrades at the bar, where we did find something inspiring. Townies!Take a close look at the brilliance here. The one in the back had a 20" rear and a 24" front. Crank arm lenght was something like 180mm. The only way to brake was to lean the bike over enough to scrape a pedal on the ground. Wonder what the CPSC has to say about that one? Anyway, we were at the bar by 6pm. Not much more to say about that, it doesn't take genious to connect the dots from there.******************************************************Volume III

Sunday morning was a late one, hung over and worried about more rain as dark clouds continued to pass by. Thankfully, they were all dry so we opted off with our originally scheduled programming - Reno/Flag/Bear/Deadman's. It did not dissapoint, especially since we shuttled the land yacht up the long, long Reno Ridge road. The weekend was getting good again! We started the ride off with a bang, the fun swoopy descent down Flag. Despite the crisp but sunny skies and dry trails, we got soaked. The trail was very moto-ed out with whoops everywhere. Every single whoop had standing mud and water. Oh, well, at least it wasn't coming from the sky that day.I stayed behind to get a shot of the crew rolling up Deadman's Gulch. Of course, we had to celebrate at the top of Deadman's before the final descent.Migz rode the log at the end.And we got dirty. The end.Well, sort of the end. There's a bonus track if you're still with us.Since we still had a shuttle vehicle at the top, Chad and I tossed our bikes in to get another ride to the top when we went to retreive the shuttle. Just so we didn't end the day feeling like a couple of shuttle pansies, we rode up and out on Reno Ridge so we could come down Deadman's again. That made it all worthwhile. Not quite a deathmarch, but I was certainly tired! The end.